The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson

In November 1924, 22-year-old Madeline McAvoy leads her four-year-old daughter, Cecily, up the walk of a Chicago orphanage. Madeline plans to marry a man named Joe Teague, who refuses to accept another man's child. She tearfully leaves Cecily with a suitcase containing a prayer card reading "Hope begins with Saint Jude," a keepsake of Cecily's deceased father, Tommy. The intake matron notes that a box can be checked to hold the child for up to a year before adoption. Madeline promises to return but never does.

The novel alternates between Cecily's hidden past and her present-day life in Itasca, Minnesota. In February 2015, 68-year-old Liz Larson Anderson, a potter and widow, learns that her 94-year-old mother, Cecily, has fallen and broken her hip. At the hospital, Cecily privately reflects on a promise she made to herself: to tell Liz and Liz's daughter, Molly, the truth about their family before she dies. Molly Anderson Bouchard, a therapist who returned to Itasca after divorcing her husband, Evan Bouchard, rushes to the hospital. Molly's 14-year-old son, Caden, tells her about a school project analyzing four generations of their family's DNA.

In flashbacks to 1927, seven-year-old Cecily is sold by the orphanage to Mr. Tebow, co-owner and ringmaster of the Sax & Tebow Circus. He introduces her to Isabelle DuMonde, the star bareback rider whose real name is Betsy Cahill from Providence, Rhode Island. Cecily is given the stage name Jacqueline DuMonde, trains as a bareback rider, and bonds with a white pony named Prince. By her third season, she still scans every crowd hoping to spot her mother but never does. As the Depression deepens, Cecily overhears Tebow proposing that she perform in a sexualized "peep show." Isabelle refuses, offering herself instead, revealing her own sexual relationship with Tebow, which began when Isabelle was 14. Isabelle grows increasingly distant from Cecily.

In the spring of 1935, Cecily, now nearly 15, meets Moses Washington Green, called Lucky, a Black roustabout, or circus laborer, who joins the crew. Lucky calms Cecily's pony when a snake startles it, and she picks up a note he drops containing lines of poetry. Lucky becomes the groom for Cecily's horses, and they bond over conversations about poetry and books. On the Fourth of July in Superior, Wisconsin, they share their first kiss and declare their love despite Lucky's fear that their interracial relationship could get them killed. After three weeks, Tebow reassigns Lucky, who soon disappears from the circus entirely, leaving only a Langston Hughes poem tucked under Prince's bridle.

After Lucky's departure, Cecily discovers she is pregnant. Isabelle, realizing Lucky is the father, denounces Cecily and has her arrested. A judge sentences Cecily to the North Carolina Reformatory for Wayward Girls until age 21. She is then sent to the McNaughton Children's Home in Wilmington, North Carolina, to give birth. After a difficult labor, Dr. Addington, the Home's physician, puts her under anesthesia and performs a cesarean section, then tells her the baby did not survive. Reading her medical file, Cecily discovers that the doctor also performed a tubal ligation, a surgical sterilization, without her consent. The procedure was ordered by the State Eugenics Board, the state body that authorized forced sterilizations. Devastated, Cecily escapes from the Home.

A former war nurse named Grace, whose gardener discovers Cecily collapsed near her home after the escape, shelters Cecily and, months later, gives her money and a train ticket to New York. Cecily spends two months in Harlem showing Lucky's snapshot to passersby without success. She secures a housemaid position in Newport, Rhode Island, where she works until the 1938 hurricane. She then contracts tuberculosis on the streets of Providence and is sent to Wallum Lake Sanatorium, where she meets young Dr. Sam Larson from Itasca. They marry, and in February 1947, driving through a snowstorm, they discover a car accident: Both parents are dead, but a five-month-old baby girl, Mary Elizabeth Myer, survives. They befriend the baby's great-aunt and great-uncle, who raised the baby's mother, Helen, and adopt the child, renaming her Elizabeth Grace Larson. Cecily convinces Sam to tell no one, and they move to Itasca, where Sam takes over his late father's medical practice.

In 2015, Liz and Molly agree to Caden's DNA project. Liz discovers a lump in her breast; a biopsy confirms cancer, but she tells no one. Cecily's recovery at The Pines rehab center is slow, and Evan's visit creates tension as he demands more custody of Caden. Molly, shaken, begins to realize she may still love him.

A parallel storyline introduces Clarissa Duncan Montgomery, a 78-year-old woman at Kure Beach, North Carolina, and her two adult daughters: Kate Montgomery, a 57-year-old former TV actress leaving rehab after a DUI following her husband's death, and Lana, a professor of American Studies. Lana's appearance suggests she may be partly Black, despite Clarissa's insistence that her husband, Clayburn Montgomery, fathered both daughters. After Clarissa receives a letter implying she was adopted through the McNaughton Children's Home, Lana pushes all three women to take DNA tests. Lana's research reveals the Home was a baby-selling operation where Dr. Addington falsified records and sold infants to wealthy couples.

The DNA results upend both families. Caden discovers that Cecily shares no DNA with Liz, Molly, or himself. Clarissa's results reveal she is 40 percent African, with ancestors from Senegal, Mali, and other regions. Most important, Clarissa has a parent/child match with a user named "CLarson" in Minnesota: Cecily's biological daughter is alive. Liz and Molly confront Cecily at The Pines. When Cecily learns her baby survived, she tells her full story for the first time, revealing that she and Sam agreed never to tell Liz she was adopted. Liz, devastated, demands to know her own origins.

In the aftermath, Cecily and Clarissa speak by phone for the first time. Liz contacts her biological uncle in North Dakota and begins coming to terms with the truth. Lana's research reveals that Lucky went to Chicago looking for Cecily while she went to New York looking for him; they missed each other entirely. Lucky's daughter, Reyna, tells them Lucky built 11 ice cream stores in Chicago and died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 54. Liz's cancer proves contained, and she is scheduled for a lumpectomy.

Evan and Molly reconcile and move with Caden into Cecily's Victorian home. Kate, in recovery, receives a DNA message from her son, Matt Kowalski, whom she gave up for adoption after she was raped at 15. In September 2015, Cecily drives to Chicago with her family to meet Clarissa, Kate, Lana, and Lucky's descendants at the former orphanage and at Lucky's grave at Oak Woods Cemetery. Reyna shows Cecily a notebook containing words Cecily wrote during her time with Lucky and a poem Lucky composed on the day Clarissa was born. Cecily meets Lucky's 15-year-old grandson, Elijah, who bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather.

An epilogue set in May 1936 reveals what happened to Cecily's baby. Ethel Oglethorpe, the house matron at the McNaughton Home, discovers that Cecily has escaped. Rather than reporting her, Ethel prepares a falsified birth certificate renaming the baby Clarissa Ann Duncan and tucks the Saint Jude prayer card into the envelope. She sends a forged telegram to the reformatory stating that Jacqueline DuMonde has died from complications of childbirth, ensuring the reformatory will erase Cecily from its records. Ethel's motivation is simple: She believes the girl deserves a chance.